My Men are My Heroes (26 page)

The strategy played out almost like clockwork: The Thundering Third captured all three objectives in less than four hours.

The next day, November 11, Kilo was involved in a series of running fights with insurgents holed up in strongpoints and supported by indirect fire from mortars and RPGs lobbed onto them from nearby buildings. Along with India, Kilo attacked abreast from south to north to clear out the insurgents still shooting up the train station. Kasal recalls that mortars rained on Kilo and RPGs sizzled into their positions from every direction.

At nightfall the company again went firm, establishing static OPs and attacking by fire any enemy forward of their positions. Throughout the night all three company FACs and the air officer conducted continuous air strikes using fast movers and two AC-130 gunships.

By now Corporal Mitchell was on a holy mission of his own, he says, to kill every insurgent he found until the battle ended. “With me personally, it was kind of a religious thing. These guys were trying to kill me. I wanted to kill them. I wanted to get a big white flag like the Crusaders had. It was my fucking Crusade. I knew that it would make them angry. I was all into taking down the Islamists. I hated them; I was passionate about it. A lot of it was about revenge.”

On D+53/1 attacked the southernmost part of Fallujah, nicknamed “Queens” by the Marines. It was November 12, but most of the Marines didn't know that. They didn't need to know that so they didn't bother remembering. They had bigger things to worry about.

Queens was the most dangerous part of Fallujah. In this district the most capable and best-equipped insurgents had dug themselves in. Most were foreign fighters who positioned
themselves there early on when they still believed the Marines' main attack would come from the south.

The move is vivid in Kasal's memory: “We started entering the Queens and all that morning it was heavy fighting—building by building—the whole way down the streets.

“I was on the street outside of houses or on the radio all morning long doing different firefights, different controlling procedures, whatever. The next thing I know we were moving out. That's when Lieutenant Grapes [3d Platoon Leader, Kilo Co.] asked if I had any extra people to help out the fire team in our building to the left.”

Kasal's answer was a resounding yes. It was the toughest fight he had been in and his account gives a moment-by-moment picture of what the battle of Fallujah was like:

“Sergeant Mitchell, Lance Corporal Nicoll, Corporal Wolf, and Lance Corporal [Samuel] Severtsgard and me got together. We ended up getting pinned down in this building. We were trying to clear a building full of enemy, and while we were in one room an enemy sniper shot Sergeant Mitchell through the back of the arm.”

Fortunately, the sniper's bullet tore through flesh but missed the bone. “It went through the back triceps, the meaty portion of the arm,” Kasal says.

“Corporal Wolf and I bandaged him up and then we formed a plan to clear this building. I said, ‘First, let's try to go through the front.' So Sergeant Mitchell sends Marines up on the roof to do overwatch that suppressed the street, the alley, and anyone they could see in the building. Then me, Mitchell, Nicoll, and Severtsgard stayed down on the bottom. I said to Sergeant Mitchell, ‘Let's punch a hole through the building and go through.'

“I told Mitchell I had a TOW out there, so let me just go tell Corporal Hurd to fire a TOW through that building. So I ran back out in the street and small-arms fire started to shoot around
us. I ran out there anyway and told Corporal Hurd to pull up into position to shoot that building with a TOW, hoping that we could blow a big enough hole so that we could make our own entrance and that it would also kill everybody in the immediate area inside the building.”

It was a good idea and probably the safest approach given the weapons they had at their disposal, but this proved to be a particularly robust building. Powerful as the TOW is it only managed to punch a 12-inch hole in the wall—too small for anyone to squeeze through. It was time for Plan B, which was considerably more dangerous—running right up to the building and trying to force open a door. That didn't work either. “It was a big metal door,” Kasal recalls. In addition to exposing the men to enemy fire it created another danger in their midst.

Before entering the house Severtsgard had armed a grenade. When they couldn't get the door open Severtsgard was essentially a walking explosion, with only his handgrip on the grenade preventing it from going off and blowing up the four men. Simply giving it a heave wasn't an option as the four couldn't be sure there weren't friendlies around. Such a move could be deadly to their comrades.

“So now we can't get the door open; so there is nowhere for Severtsgard to throw the grenade,” continues Kasal. “For the next 15 or 20 minutes while we are still in this firefight he is running around with the pin pulled on a grenade. Finally when we realized there was nobody else around, he was able to throw that grenade into the back part of the house and get rid of it.”

The men retreated into the adjacent house again where Kasal came up with Plan C. “Now I say, ‘Okay, we will go through an alley that parallels the house and come around and try and enter the back side.' Me and Nicoll were in front, Mitchell was third, and Severtsgard was fourth. I helped Nicoll get over a wall leading into the alley. Then I jumped over the wall and Sergeant
Mitchell and Severtsgard did overwatch while me and Nicoll started moving down the alley.”

Unfortunately this was just the opportunity for which the entrenched enemy had been lying in wait. “We got about halfway down the alley when all of a sudden small-arms fire started hitting all around us, just barely missing us,” Kasal says. “Then a couple of hand grenades landed right at our feet.

“Luckily there was a 3- or 4-foot wall right next to us and we were able to jump over that wall and avoid the blast of the hand grenades. So then we knew that wasn't an option anymore; the enemy had that completely covered by fire.

“We just barely escaped. We got lucky. We got lucky as hell! There was probably a 20-round burst and all 20 rounds came within inches of us.”

Plan D involved calling in the heavy artillery. “I had Sergeant Mitchell call Lieutenant Grapes and see if they could get tank support—81s or some other kind of fire support—to bear onto the building and level the whole thing.”

Unfortunately given the close-quarter fighting that was going on all around them, that option wouldn't work either—and for the same reason it took Severtsgard so long to dispose of his grenade.

“We got word back that we couldn't because of adjacent units being too close,” Kasal says. “Then we got word to move out and give up the building altogether. We marked it with a grid and sent it over the radio up to higher so higher knew that the building had not been cleared yet and was full of enemy activity. There was another battalion on the next street over—I think it was 1/8—so we marked the building for them, hoping they would have better luck coming from another direction, or after we moved out level it with some kind of fire support.”

Much later when he had time to reflect Kasal decided his close calls on the 12th were a true test of his warrior skills. For
him it was an intense exercise in correctly implementing tried-and-true infantry tactics in close-quarters combat. The correct solution was to probe the enemy, make him react to reveal his location, then find a place to flank him and get the upper hand. The ultimate goal was to counterattack and destroy the insurgents as quickly and efficiently as possible.

“To me a firefight is like a chess game,” Kasal says. “It's a fight between me and him and I am trying to outwit him. When he fires at me, in my brain housing group [a Kasalism for ‘head'], I am trying to figure out a way to counter him.”

Irrepressible Nicoll had a much less intellectual reaction. He talks about it as though it were a grand adventure: “The day before we got hurt was probably crazier than the day we got hurt. Anytime there would be something, First Sergeant would be there. He was the only one [senior NCO] I ever saw out there. For the last two days we had been walking side by side. First Sergeant called me up and wanted me to go point for him. We were between two houses and a fence.

“There was about 2 feet between the houses. We jumped over the fence. Him and me were the only ones who had gotten over. Me and him were taking fire; we were wide open. I got shot in the shin,” Nicoll says. “It barely broke the skin.”

Almost immediately after Kasal's intense fight, while moving south along PL Henry, Kilo was ambushed from both the east and west flanks by a skilled group of foreign fighters with good equipment and excellent discipline. The foreigners used booby traps and other obstacles to halt the column in an almost inescapable kill zone. The insurgents' craftily laid explosives channeled the Marines into killing zones that made them easy targets. Kilo's Marines were forced to root them out in the face of heavy RPG fire, small-arms fire, and sniper fire, much of which originated from 1/8's zone.

In a rare display of very close air support Kilo's FAC directed nine strafing attacks by Marine Corps F-18s using 20mm cannon fire because rockets and bombs were a “danger to adjacent friendly units,” Smay recalls.

By late afternoon, about 5:30 p.m., Kilo's Marines had broken through the insurgent ambush with brute force, but not before they had fired every weapon in their inventory. Smay's precision air strikes allowed the mud Marines to continue their advance to the intersection of PL Henry and PL Isabel.

In a final effort Kilo called in four more air strikes that made use of four precision-guided 500-pound bombs to neutralize an active sniper position on top of a mosque minaret. When the smoke cleared the sniper was gone, and so was the minaret, Smay says. Meanwhile, India reached the city's southern edge.

Optimism was high back in the rear, Buhl recalls.

Smay's last mission brought the day's intense fighting to an end, allowing Kilo to set up a firm base for the night. They picked a huge house, a building photographer Lucian Read would later describe as “almost a palace.” Mitchell thought it was the mayor's house. Whatever it was, the house was an imposing structure that gave the Marines plenty of room and plenty of cover. As soon as they settled into the debris-filled rooms they posted sentries and put out observation posts (OPs). Queens was no place to let their guard down.

By nightfall the shooting quieted down except for the AC-130Hs working out in the neighborhood, providing night music that ebbed and flowed with the movements of the insurgents. Basher was busy all night reporting small elements of insurgents darting from building to building and point to point around Kilo, while the OPs called in movement from around the compass.
The foreign fighters were smarter now and they didn't give the Finger of God a lot of time to strike them dead.

Basher's syncopated symphony was accompanied by odd bursts of automatic weapons fire that ripped down alleys and boulevards. Sometimes green tracers would arch into the night sky and sometimes the bullet swarms were red. An occasional series of unexplained booms echoed across the city. Now and then a fast mover opened the sky when it climbed out after a pass, or a chopper settled into the LZ at the train station. Occasionally mortars coughed or the artillery on the eastern edge of the city cleared its throat, but compared to the daylight hours it was almost peaceful.

The Marines off watch settled onto floors, abandoned furniture, and nooks and crannies where they could chow down on some MREs and bottled water before stretching out for two or three hours. But that night nobody got much sleep.

Given all the movement they detected, it didn't take long for Jent and Buhl to deduce that Kilo had settled in for the night in a viper pit. Foreign fighters appeared all around Kilo's firm base preparing for Round Two. The Marines believed getting into the next day's fight was going to be easy. All Kilo had to do was try to move.

 

 

 

After the intense fighting the day before, the morning of the 13th broke with an eerie calm. Kilo's Marines were slightly west of PL Henry, still in the old quarter of the city the foreign jihadists had staked out as their own. Kilo's orders were to push west toward the Euphrates conducting a systematic pattern of search-and-attack maneuvers to clear the foreign fighters that were reportedly all around them.